Cedric The Entertainer is opening up on what he believes are some of the reasons why a follow-up to 2000’s “The Original Kings of Comedy” never came to light. The Spike Lee-directed stand-up special starring Cedric, as well as D.L. Hughley, Bernie Mac, and Stevie Harvey became a huge success at the box office, before going on to spawn multiple spin-offs but, surprisingly enough, never a sequel.
During a recent sit-down on Shannon Sharpe’s podcast, “Club Shay Shay,” Cedric was asked about the controversy that the movie was plagued by, with long-standing claims that Bernie and Steve didn’t get along with each other during filming. The tension between them is now said to be what ultimately contributed to the four-piece never getting back together for a second run.
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“I mean, you know, they were the kind of guys that… they both Alpha males. You know, like, they both, they just saw it different–you know what I’m saying? But, at the end of the day, they was able to get through it,” he said. While Cedric thinks that Steve and Bernies’ issues may have perhaps added to a sequel never materializing, he also thinks “that it had a lot to do with the promoter on the thing because he got a bigger head than all of us.”
In his own words, the promoter who put the comedy tour together started to think the entire production “was about him,” alluding that the money side of things was not aligned when seeing just how much certain people had earned from the stand-up.
“The dude that put us all together started to really think it was about him. So, it started to be that. So, it was a lot of those kinds of elements.”
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Steve and Bernie’s feud is believed to have started back in 2003 when the latter did an interview for GQ Magazine, where he asserted that the 65-year-old had become jealous of his fellow comedian’s rise to fame. He further claimed how Steve had allegedly tried to stop his bag by preventing certain movie deals from reaching him after his breakthrough success in comedy.
It would be seven years before Steve would address the topic — particularly Bernie’s statement in the GQ interview — insisting that the things said about him trying to prevent anyone from a movie deal was false. “I was upset at first because it just wasn’t true,” Steve said during on BET’s “Conversations with Ed Gordon” in 2010. “Me and Bernie had a lot of good times together and then this article in GQ came out and put all this vicious stuff in there. B said he never said it. I had to take him at his word for it.”